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Friday, November 14, 2014

Corey Kluber just a won a Cy Young Award without an advantage in ERA, without an advantage in win/loss record, without name recognition and without his team making the playoffs. I’d be remiss to ignore the fact that many voters also cited his strong stretch run in the second half, but it sure seems like Corey Kluber just won a Cy Young Award largely due in part to his FIP. And despite the “old-school” reputation of the BBWAA, that’s a big step in the right direction.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Showalter, who received 25 first-place votes, became just the fourth manager to win the Award at least three times, joining Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa (who each won it on four occasions), and Lou Piniella. Along with La Russa, Showalter is one of just two skippers to win with three different teams.
Williams, meanwhile, made some history of his own, taking home the award in his first season at the helm. He is now the fourth rookie manager to win the award, joining Hal Lanier (1986 Astros), Dusty Baker (‘93 Giants) and Joe Girardi (2006 Marlins). Williams earned 18 of the 30 first-place votes.

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Awards were announced on Monday, with White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu the unanimous selection in the American League and Mets right-hander Jacob deGrom taking home the honor in the NL.

I also know why Fielding Bible voters are averse to Jones — his defensive numbers are annually mediocre. The Dewan plus/minus system, which tries to measure how many plays a player makes against the league average, calculates that every single year since 2009 Jones has made FEWER plays than the average outfielder. His other defensive numbers are not very exciting either.

When you add in his arm and Good Plays Made, Jones is actually a little above-average in centerfield. When you add in that he plays every day every year (which means managers have a better chance of seeing him play), it’s not entirely shocking that he keeps getting voted in.

Monday, November 03, 2014

In the last Fielding Bible they listed a few different categories. I have not been able to find the full listing. If you can share it, please contact me.

Good Fielding Play/Misplay & Error ratio: For brevity, I’m going to refer to this as Good Play/Bad Play Ratio. Baseball Info Solutions has staffers watch every game and among their duties is to rate defensive plays as Good Plays or Misplays & Errors, based on a series of rules devised by Bill James and other statisticians.

There are approximately 30 categories of Good Fielding Plays and 60 categories of Misplays and Errors. Think of it as an advanced scorekeeping system that keeps fielders (and official scorers) honest.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Cain, who led AL outfielders in defensive wins above replacement this season, was passed over for Boston’s Jackie Bradley Jr., Chicago’s Adam Eaton and Baltimore’s Adam Jones. In the four-game sweep of Baltimore, Cain won the AL Championship Series MVP award.

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Last year’s winners: AL Player of the Year - Mike Trout; AL Pitcher of the Year - Max Scherzer; AL Rookie of the Year - Wil Myers; AL Manager of the Year - John Farrell; NL Player of the Year - Andrew McCutchen; NL Pitcher of the Year - Clayton Kershaw; NL Rookie of the Year - Jose Fernandez; NL Manager of the Year - Clint Hurdle

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, who faces a 50-game suspension for testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug, is expected to speak at a banquet where he will accept his award for being voted National League MVP.

Braun will appear at the annual awards dinner of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Saturday in New York, a spokesman for the player told The New York Times.

“He will be there and he will accept his award,” Matthew Hiltzik told The Times.

...He has not made a public appearance since news of the positive test broke on Dec. 10. Hiltzik told The Times that Braun does not intend to do interviews Saturday. Braun was named MVP on Nov. 22.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Still, the fact that Tigers ace Justin Verlander was named the AL MVP re-opened an apparent wound for Martinez about his distress in being snubbed in the 1999 MVP voting, a year when Martinez went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts but was left off the ballots of two writers (George King of the New York Post and LaVelle Neal III of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune), resulting in Martinez finishing second to Ivan Rodriguez in the race. Martinez also rankled at the memory of finishing second to Barry Zito in the 2002 AL Cy Young race.

“I was kind of pissed off at first [when Verlander won the MVP], but then I went to realize that they are the [voters] are going to have to live with that label on their back. If anyone calls them prejudice or racist for not voting for me, everyone will have to understand that it’s their responsibility for not voting for me at that time,” said Martinez.

...“I was ripped apart,” added Martinez. “I’m not afraid to say that the way that George King and Mr. LaVelle Neal III went about it was unprofessional.”

On pitching during the Steroid Era:

At the time, all I wanted was to compete. To me, it was normal. There were so many players doing it that it was normal. … You could see the guys being beefed up from one year to the next. I told so many guys, I remember Brady Anderson going from 40 homers to nearly seven the next year. I saw Luis Gonzalez go from 57 to, what, 17 the next year? It was weird. It was weird.

Everybody just admired what I was doing. Everyone was so caught up in my success. But I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. All I wanted to do was to compete, to help the Red Sox win. It didn’t matter to me what I did individually. If I left Boston without that ring, without that championship, I’d feel like a bitter man right now. It didn’t matter to me that I was called a prima donna when I would miss two or three starts. I never did a steroid to [recuperate] in the time those guys would recup. I know how much a quad would probably hurt someone or a hamstring, how long it would take. I saw guys like [Clemens] sometimes get a hamstring or a quad or something, and in two days, he was right back and throwing 97.

I don’t know what went on. I certainly know that he recuped a lot quicker than I would, and I was younger. I pitched less, a lot less, than Roger did. He wasn’t young. He was a Hall of Famer before he got into that.

[Barry] Larkin getting in after a couple of decades or a Veteran’s Committee ballot wouldn’t add to Trammell’s cause. But Larkin got in on his third year of eligibility with 86 percent of the vote. Larkin wasn’t a borderline case—he didn’t satisfy the extra-super-special-first-ballot-bonus-points ninnies, but he was clearly a Hall of Famer in the voters’ eyes right from the beginning.

It’s that last statistic up there that’s the reason for the gap between the HOF perception gap between Larkin and Trammell. CRiL is a proprietary statistic I developed specifically to measure shortstops against each other. It’s a park- and era-adjusted stat that can sum up a shortstop’s Hall-of-Fame chances in a single number. It stands for “Cal Ripkens in League.” Larkin outpaces Trammell easily on this one.

Again, it’s not that Larkin wasn’t better than Trammell. By most metrics (and obviously in the court of public opinion), he certainly was. But if Larkin is a Hall of Famer, Trammell certainly deserves a closer look. The gap between them wasn’t that big…

Another difference between Larkin and Trammell is that the latter had a sidekick who was also worthy of the Hall of Fame. For just under two decades, Lou Whitaker played along Trammell, making All-Star teams and hitting at a position where most teams shouldn’t have a hitter. The two rode around on tandem bikes and finished each other’s sentences, and there might have been a tendency to pretend that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. If Trammell played a couple decades with Doug Flynn, maybe he would have stood out more.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Apparently “Craig” only needs a first name, like Cher, Madonna or Snooki.

This morning, Craig [Calcaterra] wrote a couple of compelling Hall of Fame-related posts.

In the first, he noted that attendance at the Museum is way, way down: more than 20 percent just from 2007 through 2011… In the second, Craig gave some Calcaterrian whatfor and whatnot to three Chicagoland Hall of Fame voters who have (again) not voted for Jeff Bagwell because of suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs (not including amphetamines, because hey if Willie Mays used greenies it’s cool)...

While I believe Bagwell should be in the Hall of Fame, I’ve never quite understood the argument that a Hall of Fame voter—if he thinks steroid use is germane—should ignore every scrap of evidence that doesn’t appear in the Mitchell Report or wherever… I believe that it’s intellectually indefensible to disqualify a player solely because you think he used steroids ... but I also believe it’s perfectly defensible to decide for yourself, based on everything you’ve seen and heard, if a player did use steroids.

Some of that makes sense, I hope. And I really didn’t intend to get into this whole thing. Really, I just wanted to express my mild surprise that Craig didn’t make any connection between Hall of Fame voting and Hall of Fame visitors. The Hall of Fame derives 98 percent of it publicity from one thing: new Hall of Famers. But lately—and for some years into the future, I’m afraid—a great deal of that 98 percent is going to be negative. It will be about Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield and Mike Piazza and all the terrible things they did, and there might well be years when literally nobody is elected to the Hall of Fame. You think attendance has been down? You ain’t seen nothing.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will the ballot be stuffed up?

Edgar Martinez – Called ‘gar’ after the fish that has lurked in reed lined waters still and waiting since there were fish and waters and lesser animals condemned to a perdition life of preydom and chased by higher forms make thinbodied and needleteethed by time or Godhand and touched with the breath of life. Called that by the denizens of a rain-soaked city not because he was thin but because his bat would hold still and then lash out at the rotating sphere of cowhide and twine stitched by women in Costa Rica who will hear tonight the low call of the yigüirro and catch sight: a shift of red-gray holding briefly the last rays of light coming through the canopy above.

Dave Parker – And you are?
Dave Parker.
And you have been on the ballot –?
Fifteen years.
And your career was—?
Up and down. Undone by cocaine.
Cocaine?
Yes, cocaine.
And you have been on the ballot—?
Fifteen years.
And you are?
Dave Parker.